Raleigh, N.C. — The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has called on North Carolina State University to expel four students who spray painted racist messages about President-elect Obama.

N.C. State Chancellor James Oblinger met with State NAACP President Rev. William Barber for about 90 minutes Wednesday morning to talk about racist graffiti that was found on campus the day after the presidential election.

Oblinger refused to take questions from reporters after the closed-door meeting. He made a brief statement: "Both sides have a good understanding of each other's perspective and we agreed to move forward."

Barber has asked Oblinger to respond, in writing, within 48 hours with an official response from the university.

The NAACP is pushing for N.C. State, and other public universities across the state, to implement a system-wide policy on hate speech and to hold diversity training for students.

While some students painted pro-Obama messages in N.C. State's "Free Expression Tunnel" on the night of Nov. 4, racist graffiti was there early Nov. 5, campus police said.

Two of the messages said: "Let's shoot that (N-word) in the head" and "Hang Obama by a noose."

"Anybody who would write this kind of language and take the time to write it is disturbed, is quite sick in the mind," Barber said. "We don't want to see any kind of Virginia Tech issue happen right here on this campus. It's wrong, it's ugly, it's vile and it's not protected by freedom of speech."

Four students have come forward and admitted to spray-painting the racist messages. The school has not released their names. Since the students were not charged with a crime, the NAACP wants the university to take action.

In response to the article (“NCSU reacts to hate speech,” Nov. 7) and editorial (“Hate speech troubling,” Nov. 9) supporting censorship of NCSU’s Free Expression Tunnel, it is absurd to side with the censorship of free speech.

Both pieces rightly point out that racial slurs are troubling, uncouth and hateful.

But why is this suddenly an issue? Last year, bigoted insults to the homosexual community were constantly found lining the tunnel’s walls in light of the newly created Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender center, and yet few decided that the insults were worthy of counseling meetings, group healing summits and crying officials in the offices of diversity screaming for the blood of the offenders.

Re: Free Speech? Only If The NAACP Likes It?Maybe it's just me, but I think there's a bit of a difference between allowing free speech and cracking down on "free speech" which advocates or supports physical harm or violence against any person or group...regardless of gender, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, etc.

That comes under the heading of hateful/inciteful [sign in to see URL] necessarily what the Founding Fathers were thinking of.

Re: Free Speech? Only If The NAACP Likes It?Well [sign in to see URL] at this point in your life you cannot distinguish between speech is merely heated/controversial versus speech which advocates or incites actual violence/harm, maybe some ABE night courses might be in order.

Calling for the hanging or shooting of a person, group, race, gender, religion, etc seems pretty clear to be "speech which incites violence".